"Where have you been, Brett?" Angela Delafont demanded as Brett Morrisson walked into Orpheus Group's temporary headquarters.
"I had to be out of town for a while," Brett said, with uncharacteristic shortness. "Death in the family.
Flashback to a cemetary. Standing next to an open grave is Morrisson and and attractive, older woman — and no one else.
Flashforward to the kitchen table in an old, cluttered house. An old woman — not the woman from the cemetary — sits at the table nursing a cup of coffee. Brett Morrisson walks in, wearing a suit. He doesn't sit down.
"You weren't at the funeral," he says.
The woman sneers. "Why the hell would I go to his funeral?"
Flashback to Brett's mother (much younger now, but clearly the same woman who will be drinking coffee in her kitchen during the funeral years from now) and Brett's father (who looks almost exactly like Brett will in 30 years), screaming at each other in their bedroom. An 8- or 9-year-old Brett, stand in the hallway, watching his parents fight in the reflection of the vanity mirror. After a moment, Brett's father catches sight of his son, and turns and starts screaming at him.
Flashforward to Brett's mother holding her young son in her lap, wiping the tears and snot from his nose. "It's all right. It's all right," she whispers, "Mommy loves you. Mommy loves you."
Flashforward to Brett, as an adult, standing in his mother's bedroom, staring at himself in the vanity mirror. Flashback to Brett, as a child, standing in the same posture, staring into the same mirror. Flashforward back to Brett, as an adult. For a moment, his father's face is superimposed over his own in the mirror.
His mother enters the room behind him. "Will you stay for a while?" she asks.
"No, no," says Brett, still staring into the mirror. For a moment, an iron mask — the same mask that he had delivered to the Man in the White Suit so many years ago — is superimposed over his own face. "I have work to do.
Flashforward to the present. "Well then," Brett announced to his fellow Agents with characteristic enthusiasm, "I guess we all have work to do!"
Agent Robert Herschler had gone out to talk to Bozzie about the latest developments on the streets, but so far Bozzie had not shown up at their regular meeting place. Just when Herschler began to get nervous and consider heading back to headquarters, Bozzie suddenly appeared, crouching on top of a low brick wall. He did not look his normal, jovial self.
"So I felt bad about giving you such scanty info on Phillip Nash," Bozzie said. "Thought I'd take a risk and nip back into the CIA building, see if maybe I could turn up anything more. And I saw you there."
Herschler remained speechless.
"Now, I know what you're about to say," Bozzie went on. "'It wasn't me,' right? I know how it goes. But you gotta understand, I gotta be careful, see? I don't have any way of knowing who I'm talking tok, see? So I think there's no need for you to get any closer. And you can consider this a message, from me to you to him: if you hurt Sam, I will fucking kill you."
And Bozzie vanished in a swirl of black smoke.
A woman entered the lobby of First Municipal Bank and Trust, and made straight for an empty teller's window. "Good morning, ma'am, chirped the teller. "Will you be making a deposit today?"
The woman took off her sunglasses — it was Cheryl Banning. "No," she said, removing a gun from her purse, "just a withdrawal."
Two men in the lobby pulled guns and starting pushing customers to the floor. A third tossed a flashbang grenade at the feet of a security guard, instantly incapacitating him.
Banning smiled as she noticded the teller triggering the bank's silent alarm. She turned to look up at a security camera, making no effort to hide her face. "The signal's gone out, boys," she called out. And then, more quietly, "Let's hope this works."
In the abandoned polio ward, Angela Delafont put two ragged cardboard boxes, each containing about 20 black bullets; two pistol clips, also loaded with black bullets; and a handful of loose black bullets onto the middle of a fold-out card table.
"This is the last of our stash," she announced to the other Agents. "Start thinking very carefully about when it's time to use these," she said, "and make every shot count."
As the Agents discussed the implications of this, Terrence Greene called out from his monitoring station at the other end of the room. "I think you'd better come look at this."
The Agents gathered around a laptop displaying a live television news feed. On the screen, a reporter was standing in front of a line of police cars, with the First Municipal Bank and Trust building in the background. A stand-off between bank robbers and police was now entereing its fourth hour. The robbers had released all hostages and were now simply holed up in the building; City SWAT teams had made two attempts to storm them so far, but had been repelled both times.
Security cameras within the bank had captured clear images of all of the robbers. When the images were shown on the screen, the Agents recognized Cheryl Banning instantly.
There was some debate over what should be done. Herschler pointed out that, since all Orpheus Agents were wanted by the law, attempting to infiltrate a location that was literally surrounded by police and press cameras would be quite dangerous. Emma MacMillian pointed out that Banning might be able to give them valuable information about Bishop's plans. They had already been trying to contact Banning for several weeks; well, now here she was.
Eventually, they decided to risk making contact. Agents Herschler, MacMillian, McGee, Mlorrisson, and Watts volunteered to go. Tommy Fabrosi, by now mostly recovered from his gunshot wound, drove the team as close as they dared; the Agents then phased down through the street's surface, made their way through the sewers, and phased up through the floor of the bank.
In the lobby, there was a tense moment as Banning's fellow Operatives attempted to verify the Agents' identity, but Banning quickly put the matter to rest. "We were hoping you would get here first," she explained. "You're pretty much our last shot."
Banning told the Agents that she and her fellow operatives were all that was left of NextWorld; that Bishop had been systematically "liquidating" his painstakingly constructed conspiracy, hunting down and killing anyone with any connection to NextWorld or Terrel & Squib. Banning and her team had been lying low for months, trying to find a way out of the City, with no luck. They had tried to make contact with Orpheus Group, but wherever Orpheus had hidden itself must be very effective, because no one seemed to know where they were hiding. Now Banning and her team were down to their last handful of bullets, and they had nowhere else to turn. As a last ditch effort, they had decided to do something egregiously public, knowing that both Orpheus and Bishop's people would quickly get wind of it, and hoping that Orpheus would reach them first.
The Agents were somewhat taken aback by the desperatin of Banning's plan. Rook would certainly be on his way to the bank at that very moment, and all of them were in a compromised position with law enforcment and television crews right outside. On the other hand, if they fled, Rook would continue to hunt them down, and possibly even track them back to their secret base in the hospital. Dodi — Banning's teammate who was haunting the bank building, was in favor of taking a stand here and now.
As they were discussing tactics and making preparations, Dodi suddenly announced that he had sensed a presence phasing in through the bank's outer wall.
They heard his boot heels echoing on the tile floor. He walked in wearing jeans and nothing else, his hands empty, and grinned.
Then he doubled over, and shoved his own hands into the substance of his abdomen, under the rib cage. With a wet, tearing sound, he pulled out two huge, black, automatic pistols. The tattoos covering his body swelled up from his skin and took on a lacquer-like sheen, becoming a latticework carapace. The wings tattooed onto his back ripped away from his flesh entirely, grew, and spread. And Rook lifted into the air underneath the vaulted dome of the bank lobby.
Those Agents that could flicker or morphose into something that could fly took the battle to him. Many of their attacks glanced off Rook's black armor. Rook responded with hails of toxic bullets, but the Agents had defenses of their own. Dodi attacked using the geometry of the bank building itself, causing pillars to smash together and gravity to shift unpredictably. Moments after the fight started, a dozen Reaper-class spectres phased into the room, and those Agents confined to the ground were forced to defend themselves and cover their allies as the spectres spread out and attacked.
Finally Agents MacMillian, McGee, and Morrisson dragged Rook down — and Agent Watts finished him off with a spite-fueled shotgun blast.
Bishop's most feared Lieutenant was destroyed.
Agent Herschler was one of the first to return to headquarters; he simply telephoned Greene and used Inhabit to travel through the line when the phone was picked up.
When he arrived, however, he found Neel Shivani lay on the floor next to the jury-rigged projection creches, unconcious. His immediate reaction was to try to haunt the building, but suddenly Greene was there, telling him to stop. "He's got some sort of bomb," Greene said, "with wires attached to the walls. You cause any sort of electrical flux, it goes boom."
Herschler found "hiim" in Kate Hennisson's room, standing over Kate's comatose body and holding a pistol to her head. It was his own doppelganger.
"I was wondering if I'd be able to see you without the goggles," the doppelganger said. "How interesting."
The doppelganger began to rant, explaining that he had leaked Orpheus' securkity information to the CIA, and then killed Philip Nash, because it was "what we wanted all this time, and what they all deserved anyway." The doppelganger thought that Herschler would be pleased, because "...they never respected us; they never listened to our suggestions; they couldn't even get their own shit together when we were trying to save them... and then this bitch —" he jabbed the gun at Kate — "...this bitch used us and then threw us away as soon as she didn't need us anymore..."
"Do you think I just sprang out of your head, from nothing?" the doppelganger asked. "I have memories. I remember my childhood; I remember the air force; I remember choking on that stupid pastie and waking up in a body bag. And I remember going down into that hive after Doug, and that wall with the hole in it, and the darkness inside... and all I wanted, all I wanted was to see how close I could get. And then I woke up and everyone was gone. I had to crawl back out of that hive by myself. And when I get back to work, and you're sitting at my desk. And when I get back home, you're sleeping in my bed. So let me ask you... who actually dreamed who?"
At that moment, Agent Morrisson manifested, masqued as yet another Herschler, hoping to cause a distraction... Agent Watts leaped onto the doppelganger's bomb, enshrouding it... and Herschler activated his Nimbus, tackled his doppelganger and puppeteering him, using spite to fuel the transformation.
The doppelganger screamed as Herschler's spite stains manifested on his physical body: black smoke oozed from his pores, and steel blades burst from his fingertips and snaked to the floor on the ends of long, barbed chains. Herschler forced his doppelganger to run across the room to the window and leap out, crashing through the glass and falling four floors to break his neck on the parking lot below.
Herschler experienced a brief period of blackness.
When he woke up, he was lying on the parking lot, uninjured. The ground felt solid beneath his hand — he was solid, in fact, in his living body even though he had been in spiritus when he'd attacked his evil twin.
He re-entered the hospital and made his way back to the polio ward. Shivani had recovered and was standing over Herschler's projection creche. There was no one inside it.
Kate Hennisson was sitting up in bed, awake at last. She looked at Herschler with dark, sunken eyes when he entered the room and, in a voice raw from the intubator, said: "You should have told us, Robert."